Georgia Tech: CCS from Vehicles with Carbon Recyle = Zero Emission Car

Georgia Tech abridged press release:

The Georgia Tech team’s goal is to create a sustainable transportation system that uses a liquid fuel and traps the carbon emission in the vehicle for later processing at a fueling station. The carbon would then be shuttled back to a processing plant where it could be transformed into liquid fuel. Currently, Georgia Tech researchers are developing a fuel processing device to separate the carbon and store it in the vehicle in liquid form.

Georgia Tech’s near-future strategy involves capturing carbon emissions from conventional (fossil) liquid hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles with an onboard fuel processor designed to separate the hydrogen in the fuel from the carbon. Hydrogen is then used to power the vehicle, while the carbon is stored on board the vehicle in a liquid form until it is disposed at a refueling station. It is then transported to a centralized site to be sequestered in a permanent location currently under investigation by scientists, such as geological formations, under the oceans or in solid carbonate form.

In the long-term strategy, the carbon dioxide will be recycled forming a closed-loop system, involving synthesis of high energy density liquid fuel suitable for the transportation sector.

Georgia Tech settled on a hydrogen-fueled vehicle for its carbon capture plan because pure hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when it is used as a fuel to power the vehicle. The fuel processor produces the hydrogen on-board the vehicle from the hydrocarbon fuel without introducing air into the process, resulting in an enriched carbon byproduct that can be captured with minimal energetic penalty. Traditional combustion systems, including current gasoline-powered automobiles, have a combustion process that combines fuel and air — leaving the carbon dioxide emissions highly diluted and very difficult to capture.

“We had to look for a system that never dilutes fuel with air because once the CO2 is diluted, it is not practical to capture it on vehicles or other small systems,”

-- David Damm, PhD candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering

The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO2 from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport.

The Georgia Tech paper also details the subsequent long-term strategy to create a truly sustainable system, including moving past carbon sequestration and into a method to recycle the captured carbon back into fuel. Once captured on-board the vehicle, the liquid carbon dioxide is deposited back at the fueling station and piped back to a facility where it is converted into a synthetic liquid fuel to complete the cycle.

Now that the Georgia Tech team has come up with a proposed system and device to produce hydrogen and, at the same time, capture carbon emissions, the greatest remaining challenge to a truly carbon-free transportation system will be developing a method for making a synthetic liquid fuel from just CO2 and water using renewable energy sources.

Comments

[Geoffrey]

Have a look at the air powered car. It beats any electric car to date in efficiency, cost, green image etc.

[Clee]

Cost? How can you talk about the cost of an air car that's not for sale yet? Until it's for sale, it's still vaporware.

[fjh]

An air car powered by vaporware and hype...do I need a hose or Blue Ray for my computer?

[Luttkus]

Vaporware, air cars and the Chevy Volt aside, the Georgia Tech research appears pointless - which is hard for me to say as there is usually something to learn from any R&D. The GT R&D would only be valuable, if at all, for a short window of time until peak oil, and would probably provide the same meager miles per gallon we have today, sans global warming emissions. These efforts do not appear original or fruitful, unless the results reveal their own futility.

[technofossil]

While this makes an interesting research project, the obvious question would be-- which is more cost effective, separating and recycling CO2 onboard a car, or compensating for CO2 emmissions by sucking CO2 out of the air? It's hard to imagine anything that could compete with land-based CO2 removal.

Would a membrane reactor and pressurized CO2 storage sysem cost and weigh less than a battery?

[Roger Brown]

the Georgia Tech research appears pointless

I would not say that this research is pointless, although I am not overly hopeful of a practical application. If hydrogen could could be cheaply produced from renewable and/or nuclear energy (I realize that this is a big "if") then methanol can be synthesized from H2 and CO2 via the reaction CO2 + 3H2 ==> H2O + CH3OH. Methanol can be used directly as a fuel or it can be processed wholely or partly into gasoline. Thus CO2 capture could enable a "hydrogen economy" without the need for a hydrogen infrastructure. George Olah has discussed this idea in his book The Methanol Economy. I am not holding my breath waiting for such a process to be become economical, but CO2 capture would allow it to work in technical sense.

[devid merry]

HI

I WANT TO KNOW MORE,

DEVIDMERRY.

GeorgiaDrugAddiction

[Cars for sale Philippines]

“We had to look for a system that never dilutes fuel with air because once the CO2 is diluted, it is not practical to capture it on vehicles or other small systems,” Well that's good. Hope you achieve your goal.

-seff-

[skid steer attachments]

It's great that people are actually out there working on this kind of stuff. Makes it look good for the future.